Talk:Nagios Web Interface Wishlist

From NagiosCommunity

Why should the new web interface use PHP and not Perl?

Nagios is written in C and has support for embedded perl to allow faster execution of perl-plugins within nagios.

On http://www.nagios.org/development/upcoming.php is said: "I'd like to see a move to PHP/Perl".

If nagios already uses perl for plugins, why not using it for the web-interface? Why introducing another language and dependency?

Maybe someone could explain why PHP sould be preferred over Perl. Thanks!

• Asked by Cero on 4th June, 2007

Although you can build web interfaces in almost any languages, PHP is more or less the standard for that purpose. There is a lot of GPL frameworks and code that could be used in building it and there are many PHP programmers out there, so it's most likely the best choice.

If you're an advanced Perl programmer I can understand that you find it easy to write it up in Perl and actually it could certainly happen and become the standard interface if a few Perl programmers can build a mature one and maintain it, but until that happens the platform choice will likely stay PHP.

About the "introducing another language and dependency" argument, keep in mind that:

1. PHP is already installed by default just like Perl in most distributions

2. A Perl web interface will likely require additional Perl modules anyways. Depending on the number of features a PHP interface may work out of the box, or will likely require less additional modules.

3. A web interface using a DB backend can sit on a different server and so the monitoring server(s) doesn't necessarily need PHP. Also IMHO most companies using OSS-based servers already have at least one PHP-enabled web server they could run the web interface on.

• Answer by Thomas on 26th August, 2007

Why should the new web interface use an existing CMS or Framework?

Most of the wishes on this page are already solved by many many existing frameworks or CMSs. With most of them it is very easy to integrate other databases like the NDO. Most of them have already a huge collection of extensions. Most of them are very good scaleable and even support clustering...

So please, don't reinvent the wheel!

• Asked by Gerd on 24th August, 2007